http://boingboing.net/2014/07/02/spooky-stereoscopic-gifs-mo.html/feed0A visit to the Scarehouse—and its creepy, adults-only basementhttp://boingboing.net/2013/10/08/a-visit-to-the-scarehousemdas.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/08/a-visit-to-the-scarehousemdas.html#commentsTue, 08 Oct 2013 14:03:45 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=260518
Every year, The Scarehouse, 10 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, puts on what many locals consider the best Halloween haunted house-type show in the region--with USA Today and Yahoo both ranking it among America's best.]]>
Every year, The Scarehouse, 10 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, puts on what many locals consider the best Halloween haunted house-type show in the region--with USA Today and Yahoo both ranking it among America's best. This year, I headed over to check it out, and received a highly-polished and extremely scary experience--and a backstage tour! Here, a makeup artist turns a performer's face into a gruesome work of art.

Here's one of the classic spooks: hardly a taster, especially given what they've got going on in the basement. It's the 120 actors, artists, technicians and staffers who make the Hollywood-quality sets, characters and special effects hit home. And it takes all year to plan the next fall's event.

Not far ahead, a not-so-classic spook--a horrific, 7 foot puking baby--ups the ante. The trip is divided into three acts: one themed around the pre-war history of the area, packed with unsettling 1920s-era toys and haunts, another around a modern-day zombie infestation, and a third around a creepy Christmas nightmare.

The design of the Scarehouse is all about small, cramped rooms that leave the visitor stumbling in the dark, from one haunt to the next. Here's a bathroom that needs a deep clean, deep within what used to be the Etna, Pennsylvania, Elks Lodge. Dating to 1915, the vast, imposing structure makes a perfect venue.

The Scarehouse's Margee Kerr leads the way to Creepo's Christmas, a 3D dimensional mindfuck created using ultraviolet paints. The visitor dons polarized glasses, creating a disorienting experience that mixes old-timey carnival with neon cyberpunk colors.

The zombie breakout has happend: in Pittsburgh, as expected. Beware the YNZR virus! The Scarehouse runs through halloween, but it's already popular: be sure to reserve a time slot to avoid long lines.

Landmark diner Primanti Brothers agreed to become local fodder for biohazard horror at the Scarehouse. Here, one is served something even nastier than its trademark fry-stuffed coleslaw sandwiches.

The most spectacular attraction this year was the newly-opened, adults-only Basement, where individual visitors receive the singular attentions of a range of nightmarish crazies and supernatural creeps. It was intense and physical: those opting for the experience must sign an agreement acknowledging they will be verbally abused, sniffed, dirtied, groped, pushed and dragged through near pitch-darkness.

The overwhelming assault begins from the outset, with the noisome scent of burning sage and a gollum-like gatekeeper laying his hands upon you. He, at least, was still more comforting than the average trip through the TSA gate at Dallas. Things soon took a turn for the worse, though--just as the waiver promised.

Without spoiling the journey, let me say that it was the most terrifying and amazing improv exercise I've ever experienced in my life. The actors and scenarios are fantastic, especially the “Happy” ending, which comes courtesy of a sexy psycho clown with anger management issues. Do I like having my hair pulled? Don't mind if you do.

I asked about the strangest things they got bills for. They sent me this list.

Never leaving home without my fitness watch, I was also able to track my heart rate and calorie burn through each attraction. The Scarehouse took me to 121 bmp, and burned 68 calories through the 20-minute experience. The Basement took me to 140 bpm, burned 140 calories, and lasted half an hour.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/10/08/a-visit-to-the-scarehousemdas.html/feed0Creepy vintage Halloween photos scarier than anything you'll see tonighthttp://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/haunted-air-halloween-photos-1.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/haunted-air-halloween-photos-1.html#commentsMon, 24 Oct 2011 18:24:10 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=125633Cyclobe, a duo with his partner Stephen Thrower. Here is his exquisite collection of antique Halloween photos, dating between 1875 and 1955, as collected in Haunted Air, with remarks from David Lynch and Geoff Cox]]>

"I like to experience each photograph as a magical event, frozen in front of me. I'm drawn to pictures with a mood that 'oozes' into the normality of the moment, and changes it. It's important to me that there's nothing to disturb this, no detail in the composition or in the models posture that could interfere with that magic."

— Ossian Brown

"I'm excited by pictures where I can see a natural mutation has occurred, not just in the condition of the photograph, with mould spots and tears creating new and unimagined landscapes, but also from the passing down and inheritance of a costume, perhaps over many years."

— Ossian Brown

"The perishing of fabrics and the rotting of early rubber, due to chemical instabilities and damp conditions, create new and sinister, puzzling abnormalities. Time and repeated wear have caused a beautiful metamorphosis, never intended or imagined by the maker."

— Ossian Brown

"All the clocks had stopped. A void out of time. And here they are - looking out and holding themselves still - holding still at that point where two worlds join - the familiar - and the other."

— David Lynch

"These are pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementoes of the treasured, the held-dear-in-heart, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers."

— Geoff Cox

"Death masks reanimate, the once-living frozen whilst aping the ravages of their own demise. Life and death is clowned and puppeted, conjoined in the conjured bodies and faces of carnival mannequins..."

— Geoff Cox

"Wolf-Man, child-wraith, witch-wife, ghoul. Playful monsters. Familiar familiars, all strangely innocent, they caper, amuse, reassure. But as the eye is drawn closer, as the eye is set to wander - thorns in the cloth; ticks in the fur; weevils in the flour. A child's frantic distress."

— Geoff Cox

"Human creatures with the feeling of being turned strange and open to falling. And glee -- they seemed to have a glee for somehow stitching a laugh to darkness."

—— David Lynch

"I was somewhere else. I thought I was someplace but now I didn't know what place. I seemed to be inside foreign worlds where there was some kind of troubling camaraderie -- as if a haunting joke was known to everyone but me and yet faintly I knew it too."

—— David Lynch

"Seance pictures wound round in a mad cat's cradle of knotted light, each sitter wearing the simulacrum of his own end."

— Geoff Cox

]]>http://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/haunted-air-halloween-photos-1.html/feed13Morrow's Diviner's Tale is a tight, literary ghost storyhttp://boingboing.net/2011/01/31/morrows-diviners-tal.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/01/31/morrows-diviners-tal.html#commentsSun, 30 Jan 2011 21:58:56 +0000The Diviner's Tale over the weekend, galloping through the last third of the book with gooseflesh on my arms, completely spellbound by this cut-above-the-rest literary ghost story.]]>
I finished Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale over the weekend, galloping through the last third of the book with gooseflesh on my arms, completely spellbound by this cut-above-the-rest literary ghost story.

Diviner's Tale's protagonist is Cassandra Brooks, a misfit schoolteacher in rural Delaware. Cassandra is also the daughter of Nep Brooks, and like her father, and her grandfather, and her male relatives back as far as they can trace, she is a diviner, and can find water by walking land with a forked stick in her hand. Half the time, she's not sure if she's kidding herself or not, but she finds water, and everyone around town -- including her twin sons, whom she is raising on her own -- knows it's true.

But Cassandra doesn't just divine water. Sometimes, she divines the future, something she discovered as a little girl, when she unsuccessfully begged her heroic older brother to skip a road-trip, a trip that proved to be fatal. These "forevisions" have driven her half mad at times, but she thinks she has things under control.

Until the day she finds a hanged girl in the woods where she is dowsing for water for a new housing development. Terrified, she calls the police, who can't find her girl -- but who do later find a mysterious runaway girl nearby. This kicks off a series of ever-more terrifying visions that are made all the worse by her deteriorating relationship with her family and the mysterious, threatening notes she's started to receive.

Spooky as hell, beautifully written, tight as a tripwire, The Diviner's Tale isn't quite like any ghost story I've read before. Morrow's prose is lush and eccentric and beautiful, somewhere between Bradbury and Kerouac at times, and his characters are superbly realized and gloriously imperfect.